Just days after their divorce was confirmed, mud is flying in the battle of Guy Ritchie and Madonna. First she slammed the "emotionally retarded" at her first post-divorce concert while introducing a song about marital estrangement. Now, accusations are flying and Guy's dad has stepped in with harsh words for his daughter-in-law.

Friends have told a newspaper that that the marriage first ran into serious difficulties in 2005 when Madonna fell from her horse. She suffered eight broken bones and felt that Ritchie showed "a complete lack of love and sympathy". She is said to have demanded in a recent argument: "Did you ever actually love me?"

In his first comments about the marriage split, Ritchie's father, John, said of the reports: "She is being beastly. She is saying, 'Did you ever love me?' It goes back to a time when she fell off her horse and she's blaming him for that. She's calling him an emotional retard. When he's being bashed by her it's horrid."

Lawyers for the singer, who was widely believed to be the dominant partner in the marriage, are putting together a dossier of incidents.

They include allegations that he told her she 'looked like a granny' on stage compared with her younger backing dancers. He is also alleged to have declared that she could not act, and was 'past it' after she turned 50.

Her lawyers say that 40-year-old Ritchie's comments made Madonna feel worthless, unattractive, unfeminine, insecure and isolated during their eight-year marriage.

The Mail has learned that Madonna's case will chronicle how she first fell for Ritchie because she felt he was a challenge and that he was tough enough to stand up to her.

However, she apparently soon started to become affected by her husband's alleged put- downs which eventually started to eat away at her legendary confidence.

Another report is about the tight ship Madonna ran at home and had extreme personal grooming habits:

Her irrational food fads and increasingly bizarre attempts to hold back time - via surgery, exercise and every therapy going - certainly helped to doom their marriage.

How could anyone expect Ritchie, a macho man who is fond of the pub and likes to shoot pheasant, to dine contentedly every night on quinoa grains and organic vegetable dumplings?

And how was he supposed to react when his wife took to retiring at night slathered in £500-a-pot cream and covered in a plastic body-suit to hold back the signs of ageing?

It now emerges that every aspect of life at the Ritchie residence in London was dictated by the lady of the house. Madonna, who embraced a macrobiotic diet in the early 1990s, told her chefs what was permitted: she chose the precise blend of Colombian coffee and tutted over the exact provenance of air-freighted Canadian blueberries.

Guy, then, has allegedly had to endure a life married to a 5ft 4in domestic tyrant whose rules apparently included no TV, no newspapers, and no welcome for his 'London' friends - sustained on a diet which would make a Hollywood starlet feel faint.